Stock Object Colors - Television Tropes & Idioms

This trope is about stereotyped object colors that are highly prevalent in fiction, but do not reflect Real Life color variations.

Green alligators and crocodiles, frogs and toads, brown (non-human) apes, yellow canaries, red crabs and lobsters, pink pigs, and white geese belong under Typical Cartoon Animal Colors.

Since this is such an Omnipresent Trope, would it be best just to list subversions, aversions, and exceptions.

Subtrope of Reality Is Unrealistic. The color version of The Coconut Effect.

Subtropes:

Purple or Dark Purple Poison

Purple and dark purple are the colors associated with poison that is more common in Eastern media.

Examples, subversions, aversions, and exceptions should be listed under Technicolor Toxin.

Purple Grapes

In Real Life, grapes can be purple, yellow-green, red violet, and red, but in fiction, they're purple because purple is the color grapes are associated with.

Blue or Light Blue Water

In Real Life, water comes in a wide range of colors, including clear, turquoise, cyan, light blue, blue-green, dark green, dark blue, and the stereotypical bright shade of blue.^note

Not so much in fiction, where water is usually a bright shade of blue. Water is Blue because it's easier to animate than a transparent liquid and because large amounts of water appear blue due to the way it diffuses light. This subtrope, which is highly prevalent in fiction, does not reflect how Real Life water is entirely accurately.

Subversions, aversions, and exceptions should be listed under Water is Blue.

Light Blue Glass

Green or Yellow Green Acid

It even has a shade named after it

despite the fact that green acidic substances are rare, and no strong or commonly used acids are green.

Green or Yellow Green Grass

In fiction, grass is usually green or yellow green because green or yellow green grass is iconic and easily recognizable.

In Real Life, golden yellow, light brown, and sandy yellow, as well as the stereotypical green and yellow green, are common colors for grass.

Green or Yellow Green Poison

Green and yellow green are the colors associated with poison that is more common in Western media.

Examples, subversions, aversions, and exceptions should be listed under Technicolor Toxin.

Green or Yellow Green Radiactive Nuclear Waste

Green and yellow green are the colors associated with nuclear waste, radiation, and anything nuclear even though this is seldom the case in Real Life. Cherenkov radiation in the pools of nuclear reactors is blue◊, radioactive cesium chloride fluoresces faintly blue, and hot radioactives are orange

◊.

The association with the colors green and yellow green and nuclear waste comes from peoples' experience with radium painted watch dials, which glow pale green. Watch dials haven't contained radium for decades. Currently they use a similar sort of paint but no radium; it absorbs light when placed in light and then glows for a while in the dark.

Yellow Sun

In Real Life, the sun is white or yellowish white, but in fiction its yellowness is played up because yellow is the color associated with the sun.

Yellow or Gold Stars

In Real Life stars can be pretty much any color, but the stars the naked eye can see in the night sky are white. In fiction, stars in the sky—especially those drawn as large, five-pointed "sticker" stars—are usually yellow to contrast the night sky's dark blue.

Star-shaped stickers and badges are virtually always gold in fiction because they're given out in a congratulatory manner—in other words, they're a proxy for a gold medal. Needless to say, in Real Life you can get star stickers and badges in pretty much any color, though gold is still the most popular.

Yellow or Orange Cheese

Cheese comes in many colors, including yellow, orange, yellow-orange, light yellow, red, white, and even blue, but in cartoons, it's hard to any examples where cheese hasn't been depicted cheddar yellow-orange or orange.

Bright orange cheeses, especially cheddar, are usually that color because it's been colored

Examples, subversions, aversions, and exceptions should be listed under Cartoon Cheese.

Orange Carrots

Almost all carrots in fiction are bright orange because an orange carrot is iconic and easily recognizable and orange is the most common color seen in Reallife Western carrots. *

This association with the color orange and carrots is Newer Than They Think, as the common orange carrots in the Western world were only bred that color a few centuries ago by farmers in the Netherlands, out of patriotic reverence for the House of Orange-Nassau. Before this, most carrots in the West were actually purple. No, really, carrots used to be purple. And carrots come in other colors, like yellow, red, purplish red, and white

◊.

Red Apples

Most apples in fiction are bright red because a red apple is iconic and easily recognizable.

In Real Life, apples come in a wide range of colors, including red, orange, yellow, and green, and can be more than one of those colors as well.

A common exception would be "sour apple" or candies that are apple flavored - which are often green.

Red Fire Hydrants

In Real Life, they come in a wide range of colors, including yellow (both light and golden shades), pink, white, dark green, orange, dull shades of red, and the stereotypical bright shade of red, and can even have two or more colors on them.

Not so much in fiction, where almost all fire hydrants are bright red. Fictional fire hydrants are usually red because a red hydrant is iconic and easily recognizable. This subtrope, which is highly prevalent in fiction, does not reflect how Real Life fire hydrants are.

Brown or Green Polluted Water

Water intended to look polluted is colored either olive green, yellow-green, or brown rather than blue or clear.

Same concept is also commonly applied to swamp water, "blackwater" in real life can look brown, tan, greenish, or pitch black.

Skin Color

The skin colour of white people nearly always depicted as pink, and we're told it's pink, but in reality its a much more subtle selection of light browns, translucency, red beneath the skin, with some blue.

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Subversions, Aversions, and Exceptions:

Sun

Other

The Japanese Flag has a red circle in the middle that represents the sun.

Apples

Film - Animated

Subverted in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the poisoned apple that the Queen prepares is red as part of the spell ("Now turn red to tempt Snow White, to make her hunger for a bite"). She places it in a basket full of yellow and green apples to make it stand out more and make it seem all the more tempting.

Fire Hydrants

Western Animation

In The Simpsons episode "Lemon of Troy", Bart leads an expedition to Shelbyville, where they marvel at how much like Springfield it is, except for small details. Milhouse in particular is spooked by the fact that the fire hydrants are yellow instead of red.
The fire hydrant in the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse movie, Mickey's Great Clubhouse Hunt that Mickey fixes is yellow.

Real Life

Averted in San Francisco, California: Most of the fire hydrants are either all-white or white with blue or blue-green tops.
The fire hydrants in Pearl District of Portland, Oregon are all orange.
The hydrants in Seattle, Washington are dark green.
Hydrants in and around Youngstown State University's campus in Youngstown, Ohio are painted like penguins to match the university's mascot.
Most fire hydrants in Malaysia are yellow with a bright red 'H' painted on (actually, that's just a marker stone telling the firemen that the hydrant is actually in a trapdoor in the ground in front of said marker stone, but that's a different trope- our hydrants are different). While there are also stereotypical red hydrants in the country, those are less common and are usually found in areas with lots of tourists or expatriates.

Space Does Not Work That Way

Common Fan Fallacies

Television Is Trying to Kill Us

Space Does Not Work That Way

Reality Is Unrealistic

Technicolor Science